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There’s a beach
where one sunny afternoon you
may witness an offering to an
Afro-Brazilian Orixa spirit of
the ocean, the next day watch
master capoeristas practicing
Brazil’s martial art dance form,
and still another day join a
gathering of thousands of
surfers-cum-dancers rocking out
to hybrid musical sounds
informed by bloco afro
(Afro-Brazilian percussion
music), samba-reggae, surf-rock,
and California funk. No, these
are not the shores of Bahia,
Brazil. This is Santa Cruz,
California, home of the
surf-and-skate, capoeira-kicking,
scene-busting phenomenon known
as SambaDa. This smoldering and
soldering band is a magnet of
unexpected particles shaved from
Brazilian and American sources.
This community of people—their
local fanbase and their
Brazilian ancestors, their
people—are honored in the title
of SambaDa’s new album Gente!
(February 23, 2010).

While SambaDa emerged from a
Brazilian dance group, founder
Papiba Godinho has not let his
status of capoeira master
dominate the band’s sound. Since
the beginning, when some of his
students started jamming on
their evenings off, the motley
members have always brought in
their own styles and ideas. The
new album features Dandha da
Hora, a powerful singer steeped
in the life and lessons of samba
culture and the Brazilian black
pride movement. When Dandha
arrived in Santa Cruz, drawn by
love from her home in the hills
and shanties of Salvador,
Brazil, she brought with her an
ethos that charges the band’s
music with an energy born of
veneration. Every September,
Dandha proceeds to the beach to
lead the ritual in honor of
Yemanja, the Yoruba Orixa of the
ocean revered in Candomblé, her
native religion. Here, the
traditions of West Africa,
carried halfway around the
world, washed up in Santa Cruz
like so much flotsam before
finding a new home in the
eclectic bricolage of SambaDá.
One track on Gente!, “Mare,”
contemplates the immensity of
the ocean, how the rise and fall
of the tides reflect our lives,
and ends with an old Yoruba
salutation to Yemanja. Yemanja
takes the offering, but returns
a gift in kind: driftwood from
Brazil, still green at the core,
takes root once again where the
sand meets the hills. Dancing
feet in a hundred-strong samba
pat down the soil, and the
strains of surf rock, alive and
well, raise the tree up to be a
new-culture organism, all Amazon
jungle wood and funky Cali
fruits.

But this is not the band’s only
ritual. Guitarist and drum
machine wizard Will Kahn likes
to jump in the water between
sets during SambaDá’s beachfront
shows, which draw thousands of
stomping, jumping fans. “The
beach is really where our music
is supposed to be,” he reflects.
Will, who joined the band in its
early days, is from Bolinas,
that famously private hamlet in
the hills near Santa Cruz.
Growing up with artists, poets,
and the intellectually curious,
Will found it natural to mix
music from around the tropical
world, but mostly reggae, with
the passionately laid-back
culture of surfing. He is
responsible for the tight,
intense tsunami of a surf guitar
that inflects SambaDa’s
Afro-Brazilian dance tunes. That
sound rides the crest of a tall
wave until it crashes into a
turbocharged Jamaican rhythm on
“Iguana,” the first track, which
also features band member Anne
Stafford on saxophone. Anne’s
klezmer music roots sidle up
alongside the Middle Eastern
inflections that Dick Dale first
introduced into surf rock.

Papiba wrote “Iguana” a decade
ago but revived it with the
band’s fresh sound, now infused
with new life and a
surf-and-skate spirit. It is a
fitting beginning to Gente!, an
album that stands as the
culmination of the band’s long
evolution. Papiba, who
originally came to America to
study, found himself drawn to
Santa Cruz by surf culture.
There, he began teaching
capoeira, which he began
practicing when he was very
young, growing up in the
ultra-modern Brazilian capital
of Brasilia, where
Afro-Brazilian culture was
ubiquitous. His teachers
inspired him to show capoeira to
the world. Today, four members
of the band play capoeira.
“Capoeira is my inspiration for
everything in life,” says Papiba.
“Everything I see.” This
athletic awareness of the self
and of the world epitomizes the
jungle-cat spirit of SambaDa,
whose music is always on a
tightrope, reined in by an
acrobat’s poise. This is the
idea of the album’s second
track, “Balançou.” In
Portuguese, this is a special
kind of swing or “balance,” a
smooth pocket that keeps
SambaDa’s music spinning between
Brazilian and American magnetic
fields. It is no wonder, then,
that members of SambaDa surf and
skateboard, prompting an unusual
sponsorship deal with the
renowned skateboard manufacturer
Santa Cruz Skateboards.

Dandha da Hora, as the newest
member of SambaDa, has brought
an ethic to the excitement.
Dandha was born in 1975 to a
family involved in the founding
of Ilê Aiyê, the first
exclusively Afro-Brazilian bloco.
Blocos organize samba dances
with hundreds of drummers for
Carnival processions, and Ilê
Aiyê is no exception, but the
group mainly promotes awareness
of and pride in Afro-Brazilian
culture. Dandha spent her life,
from ages six to twenty-nine,
learning, singing, and dancing
in this “House of Life” before a
charismatic filmmaker and
activist for Brazilian
traditional music, now her
husband, convinced her to come
to Santa Cruz. At first, she
went to visit for a month, which
turned into two months, then
three, then a career.

When Dandha came
to Santa Cruz, she began to
teach Brazilian dance to private
students. Dandha attracted
plenty of devotees drawn to
Santa Cruz and San Francisco
Bay’s vibrant Brazilian music
scene, but she soon found that
her lessons challenged the
mainstream idea of Brazilian
dance – “all about bikinis and
feathers.” Through her husband,
she met Papiba, who invited her
to be a guest singer for SambaDá.
The band quickly asked her to
become a permanent member. “That
was a scary moment for me!”
Dandha remembers. She is the
embodiment, it seems, of the
boundless energy that typifies a
SambaDa band member. “It was a
big transition in my life. And
when I said ‘yes,’ it was too
late to come back!” Now, she
says, “I have my third family
with SambaDá. Every time we go
on the road, for several hours
in a van, we know we are a big
family: we shop together, we eat
together, we cry together. We
all crash in the same room
together!”

Family is also a theme in Papiba
Godinho’s songwriting. “Meu Pai”
records the moment when Papiba
realized his father was ill.
Normally Papiba’s trips back
home to Brasilia for capoeria
events are short and fast,
leaving not enough time to spend
with his family. “My father,” he
laments, “I came only to see
you. I arrive early in the
morning and leave by nightfall.”
SambaDa asks, which is better?
To be close to the ones you
love, or to make a new community
your own? These multicultural
rovers find their answer in
both.

Dandha’s extended
family had a long-awaited
reunion on SambaDa’s recent
pilgrimage to Brazil and Ilê
Aiyê. For years, the band, which
is mostly American, had labored
for authenticity under the
guidance of Papiba. One day, a
friend of a friend of a friend
of Dandha’s convinced the mayor
of São Paulo to hire them for
the city’s annual festivities.
The Brazilophiles in the
hard-working, hard-playing band
practiced and refined their act
for the “authentic” audience
that awaited them. Even Papiba
and Dandha were hesitant about
playing Brazilian music to
Brazilians. “I was afraid of the
reaction of the people,” recalls
Dandha. “We had played for
Americans. It’s different when
you go back to Brazil, where
everybody speaks Portuguese.”

Instead, SambaDa’s salvation
came in the form of personal
authenticity, a balanced and
blended sound that they owe both
to musical camaraderie and to
the guidance of Greg Landau, who
also produced their previous
album, Salve a Bahia. For years,
the band had maintained a
following with its
rough-and-ready mix of funk,
surf, and capoeira sounds. “But
once we started working with
Greg,” recounts Will Kahn, “we
realized that he was holding us
accountable for the American
styles that we claimed.” Instead
of letting the people of São
Paulo down, SambaDa’s hybrid
groove kept them dancing in the
rain. They might have said that
the Americans had dende, the
“palm oil” flavor that stands
for excellent capoeira moves.
The band chose that name for the
third track on Gente!, a
rollicking evocation of
Brazilian Carnival ready for the
club DJ. As SambaDa played on,
several members of Dandha’s
second family showed up to
dance. Will, looking back, calls
that moment “a real affirmation.
This was a dream come true.”

SambaDá also traveled into the
hills, to Salvador and the House
of Ilê Aiyê. They were the first
American band to play at Ilê
Aiyê, perched on a hill in the
neighborhood of Liberdade, a
mostly Afro-Brazilian
neighborhood of Salvador. There,
they were reassured that
authenticity is not the measure
of creative success. “I showed
my community what else I could
do!” remembers Dandha, Ilê
Aiyê’s prodigal daughter, with a
hint of pride. These truly were
the gente, the “people.” The
band wrote “Casa de Mãeinha,”
meaning “my mother’s house,” as
a tribute to the people there,
who showed a kind reluctance to
let them leave. The song is a
counterpoint to the distance of
“Meu Pai” and a celebration of
closeness and the discovery of
family affection.

SambaDa are careful to stick to
their musical roots even as they
innovate. “Sangue Africano
Remix,” samples a song sung by
Graca Onasile, the first female
singer in an Afro-Brazilian
bloco. The song praises Exu, the
messenger Orixa, but Will Kahn’s
hip-hop remix gives it a new
vibration for a global audience.
All the same, the band has found
that it is their uniqueness,
their newness to all audiences,
that makes them stand out. One
night at Ilê Aiyê, Will Kahn
brought his drum machine to back
up the band with hybrid
hip-hop/Afro-Brazilian beats.
The children in the house were
wide-eyed with enchantment, as
excited and enraptured as the
crowds of Californians who take
in SambaDa’s twist on Braziliana.

Will provides the moral of the
journey: “If you bring who you
are and represent where you come
from, people go crazy over it.”
The palm of Salvador, planted on
Californian soil, has borne
SambaDa, a band of its own with
something for any crowd. They
make music with flexible
muscles, ready for action, but
tempered by respect for the
forces of nature and the love of
good friends.